Open Source

I have written several R packages that deal with Mapping and Open Data.

Mapping Packages

The main package I developed is choroplethr, which is a play on the words “choropleth map” and “R”. Choroplethr is easy to use, and originally only handled US States and Counties. You can learn the basics of choroplethr from the following articles:

After creating the initial version of choroplethr I got several requests to “hook it up to other maps”. That is, provide the same ease of use as choropleth, but for maps like countries of the world and US Zip Codes. I did this by first making choroplethr work with arbitrary shapefiles, and then hooking it up to a handful of other maps:

Courses

Getting the Code

While this work is conceptually one body of work, for technical reasons it spans six different R packages. To add to the complexity, some of these packages are available on CRAN, and some are only available on github. The following chart lists each R package, the current version, and the location of the package.

Package Name

Version

Location

choroplethr

3.5.3

CRAN

choroplethrMaps

1.0.1

CRAN

choroplethrAdmin1

1.1.0

CRAN

choroplethrZip

1.5.0

github

choroplethrCaCensusTract

1.2.0

github

rUnemploymentData

1.1.0

CRAN

Learn to Map Census Data in R

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